Beginning Meatloaf Gravy

Shannon Overmiller: Hello, my name is Shannon Overmiller. I am the chef at The Majestic in Old Town, Alexandria. We are making home style meatloaf today. Previously I've showed you how to bake, make the glaze, bake the meatloaf. While the meat loaf is baking, we started to whip potatoes, that's going to take us approximately 20 minutes. During that time we can start the meatloaf gravy, so this way all of your ingredients and all of your components of your dish are coming together around the same time. Altogether this whole dish takes about an hour to complete. So, while the potatoes are cooking, I'll show you what we need, the ingredients we need to start the meatloaf gravy. Start up your pan on a low heat, simmer to start. You want a high heat, you want to start with caramalisation but since I am going to demonstrating I am going to keep it kind of low, it will heat up on its own.

Things you need to start your meat loaf gravy are approximately two tablespoons of butter, one in the beginning to start, one in the end to finish, heavy cream, fresh thyme about a tablespoon, plus or minus, some of the meat loaf mixture that we had from before, the left over and if you don't have any of this left over, you can always use the beef, the pork and any veal scraps that you have and as I stated before you want to make your sauces from what is in the actual dish. So this is fine to start. One chopped onion, flour, about a cup of white wine, salt and pepper to taste and as we said in the recipe, you can also use the drippings or the falling from the meatloaf when its done cooking. Let us begin the meatloaf gravy.

So to begin, you also need chicken stock, about two cups of chicken stock and in the end, I like to finish this meatloaf gravy, it's up to you entirely, but we like to use sauted mushrooms and put that in right at the end of our meatloaf gravy. When sauteing mushrooms, you want a very high heat, salt, pepper, thyme, butter, olive oil and that's it. You want to get caramalisation on your mushrooms and you don't really want them to boil at all. So, now also while we are going along, you see the potatoes are now coming to a simmer, that's all we want, not too heavy boiled. As I said once the potatoes come up to a boil you want to bring it back down to a nice simmer. Don't go crazy with the boiling, reduce your heat by about three quarters, a half to a quarter. Now our pan is heating up, we are going to begin our saute for the meatloaf gravy. Onions - and quick it's a little hot so -- you can add anything you want at this stage, you can add garlic, carrots, celery. It's just a simple gravy. Start to work your onions a little bit. Let these come down to a little translucent in color. I am going to add the meat at this point too, because I want to get a little color on the meat, so I am going to bring the temperature back up and cook them together. A little bit of beef and pork's scrap, left over or some of the meat mixture itself left over, this makes a great sauce.

Now we have got a good heat going, I want to get a little color on our meat, it just adds richness to your sauce. A little salt and pepper, you always want to layer your sauces. Layering is very important especially with the sauce. Just like we do with the meat loaf, that's a layer as well. If you build layers but go gently with them, it's good to -- you can adjust as you go because doing things in layers adds each element of the dish and each element of the item, has its own individual seasoning. So, this is very high heat, but I do want to get some color on this meat, and season all these especially with onions, with salt because it brings out the moisture. So we want our meat to cook through. Check your potatoes they have got about ten more minutes. They are starting to come apart now as you see. Just starting to yield, and now my meat is just about there, all cooked, and thats what we wanted. You can add a little tomato product at this point with some of the glaze left over, it will add sweetness and richness. So take a little bit of our glaze, we usually use tomato paste at this stage but this is fine as well. It will give us some color as well. About a tablespoon and there we go. So now we can start to add our flour once we have cooked the tomato product out, we can add our flour and it just starts what is called sort of a roux, for a base sauce. You really don't even -- if you don't choose to use flour or if you have an allergy, you don't have to use flour. This is just a classic way of thickening a sauce.

You can also just add your sauces and layers as you go and then reduce it down to the consistency that you want. But the classical meatloaf gravy uses flour, we'll demonstrate that. Just a tablespoon or two, just cover all the surface, you need to cook your flour out, so you don't want to taste flour. Degalze that off a little bit. Alright, so now you're cooking your flour out and you see the mixture has come together and forms a paste like -- and this is where you can deglaze, and once your flour is cooked out, careful not to get anything stuck to the bottom, because then you have to remove bits from the bottom. You want to take your wine and this is deglazing, this is how you get all little bits of -- and then you want to reduce the wine, so that when you deglaze you add in your liquid and take it off the heat and you scrape it and that gets all the good bits out off the bottom. You don't want to have anything stuck to the bottom because you don't want to burn.

So, now that we've added our wine and it's reduced into the flour meat mixture, a paste is formed. The flour is been cooked out, we are ready to add the liquid to the base now to start our sauce, and after we add the liquid, we will reduce this -- bring it up to boil then reduce down to a simmer, and let it simmer for about - until the meat is done, probably about half an hour, 45 minutes and then we'll finish it with cream. Let's just bring our temperature back up because we're going to add liquid and that will counterbalance in terms of coming up, so we want to bring it up quickly. Add in some chicken stock. We are going to add about two cups, three cups. Some heavy cream and then we will strain this out and at this stage you will want to add a little seasoning to it as well, since you have added this liquid. You will want to add your layers now. It's a beautiful gravy, very rusty, very home style, creamy gravy. As soon as this comes up to boil it will thicken immediately. We don't want it too thick, so if you have to add more stock or more cream feel free to. We want it just to the coding consistency which I showed you previously. At this point I would like to taste it, see where my seasons at and add my herbs. A little bit of salt, a little pepper, thyme, little now fresh thyme, about tablespoon, two tablespoon. Now when it's coming to a boil, we reduce it down and remember we don't want to burn and that's how you are going to simmer your sauce for your meatloaf.